Login

Username *

Password *

Register

Username *

E-mail address *

First name *

Last name *

Organization/Affiliation

Mobile phone number

Format should be xxx-yyy-zzzz. Please type in your international access code when you live outside the US and Canada. Format is +1 (for US/Canada). Format should be than +xy- xxx-yyy-zzzz.
Look up your code here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_international_call_prefixes

Please let us know your facebook name. But only when you are okay with it. To do so: Open another window/tab to and login in your facebook account, click on your facebook profile and copy the url, it looks like this https://www.facebook.com/YOUR_USERNAME?ref=bookmarks or https://www.facebook.comYOUR_USERNAME. When you copied it, please paste it in here.

Twitter URL

URL

Please let us know your twitter name. But only when you are okay with it. To do so: Open another window/tab to and login in your twitter account, click on your profile and copy the url which should show up in your url window of your browser, it looks like this https://twitter.com/LeftForum. When you copied it, please paste it in here.

What is Marxism? Is Marxism Still Relevant?

#LEFTFORUM2019 June 28th to 30th!

This panel is inspired by the bicentennial of Karl Marx’s birth on May 5, 1818. On June 30, 2018, the NY Times published a column headlined: “The Millennial Socialists Are Coming.” Is “the spectre of communism [still] haunting” America and the world 200 years after Marx was born? Panelists representing different leftist parties and perspectives will tackle these questions and more. Speakers will explain their conceptions of what Marxism is and explore whether Marxism is still relevant 170 years after Marx and Engels wrote The Communist Manifesto.

Is Marxism a Stalinist police state with a command economy and gulags? Or is Marxism a utopian pie-in-the-sky fantasy of a classless society? Is this just an outdated philosophy from 1848 that is no longer relevant in the 21st century? Or is Marxism a participatory, direct democracy of the workers, by the workers and for the workers?

Is Marxism applicable in 2018? Come the revolution, how will Marxism impact on economics? Race? Gender? Class? Militarism? Endless war? Can Marxism solve inequality across the board and create an egalitarian social system? Is Marxism a workers’ paradise, “an association in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all,” where the golden rule is “from each according to their abilities to each according to their needs”?

Participants

Born into a progressive working class family in Baltimore, MD, Carl Wood has been active in the civil rights and anti-war movements since childhood. He attended the University of California, Riverside where he was elected student body president and organized local opposition to the Vietnam war...

Val Carlson is a retired attorney who has spent her career fighting for affirmative action, civil rights, civil liberties, and workers’ rights. She led legal teams that protected the First Amendment associational privacy privilege in electoral politics and that won race, sex, and political...

Stephan Hammel is a Marxist educator and agitator living in Santa Ana, California. He is Assistant Professor of Music at the University of California at Irvine. He has written about value theory, Marxist Aesthetics and the continued relevance of the historical materialist approach to history....